Welcome back to Anime Rants! One of the highlights of this episode was Senku’s moment of being romantically “slick” and charming when welcoming Luna. Speaking of Luna, she’s an attractive new character from Dr. Xeno’s camp. My thoughts on Luna and this episode as a whole are below.
Episode 6: Science is Elegant
Episode Rating: 7/10
We don’t know a lot about Luna yet, but going by what Dr. Xeno said in the previous episode, she was probably a statue that stayed conscious and was revived using nitric acid. Luna has not shown any special skills yet, but her attractiveness makes her a good fit for an infiltration mission. It also helps that she’s closer to Senku and company’s biological ages. (Luna is in her early 20s while Senku is 18 by this time according to the Dr. Stone fandom wiki.)
Luna is a decent character, but she’s definitely not my favorite. Her main feature so far is a comedic character gag. She believes herself to be “cool and capable,” monologuing about it in her head while being cringe and hyper-emotional in reality. Considering Dr. Stone‘s history with casual misogyny, I’m not surprised by this type of joke for a female character. I do wish, however, that she was as capable and cool as Gen, so we could have matching spies with similar skills and abilities.
Speaking of problems in Dr. Stone, there’s one example of sexist prejudice in this very episode. But we’ll get to that a bit later. First, I have more notes to cover. For starters, two other new characters were introduced in this episode. They are two men named Max and Carlos. As fans of Luna and her beauty, they follow her around and offer to help her carry things. Of course, they end up arguing or trying to flirt with Luna more often than they are actually helpful.
(Side Note: I’ve often wondered if some Dr. Stone characters can be read as people of color. Most of them are not designed to look ethnically different from the others. But Interestingly, Carlos seems to be designed to look either black or brown (possibly Hispanic given his name). It’s good that diverse characters are appearing in minor roles – now, if only we could get anime to feature more of them as main characters.)
Dr. Xeno sent Stanley out to assassinate “Dr. Taiju,” whom they believe is the leader of the group on the Perseus. Stanley brought Luna with him and she allowed Carlos and Max to come along as well. The plan is for Stanley to snipe Dr. Taiju from far away, up in the trees. In order to know who to shoot, he will send Luna as a spy and have her point to Taiju while he is out on the open deck. Luna feels bad about helping with a killing, but for now, she’s too scared to do anything but comply with Stanley.
Thus, Luna acted like a hurt, troubled runaway from Xeno’s faction. The crew wasn’t sure what to do with her, but Senku immediately welcomed her. He was absolutely charming and dapper when interacting with her. I loved the animation for this. Senku suddenly became cute and sparkly like a true young gentleman. The others wondered if Senku was attracted to Luna and wanted to hook up with her. A foolish suspicion for anyone who knows Senku. He’s a raging asexual icon.
Sure enough, Senku was not excited to hook up or even flirt with Luna; he basically only wanted to play spy with her and have some battles-of-wit while questioning her. But despite his high charisma, Senku was bad at getting Luna to talk. Of course, the good people on the Perseus would never think of barbaric things like torture. However, they were happy to bribe her. Francois had the brilliant idea to make icecream for Luna. I love these characters. XD
(Side Note: It was stupid but hilarious to see Luna’s expression when she ate the icecream. That is not an icecream face. That’s clearly another kind of face, lol.)
Just to follow up on an earlier point, let me explain the little red flag in the writing of this episode. Max, Carlos, and Yo all assert that openly sexualizing and oggling Luna is something they do just because they are men. How incredibly insulting to good men. This is an example of where sexism hurts men, too – at least, the ones who don’t want to be treated like obligatory predators by half the population.
The problematic writing also implies that all men experience sexual attraction to women, ignoring the existence of gay and asexual men. Still, this bad script didn’t upset me much because it’s clear from the show’s own narrative that the sexist assumption was incorrect. Senku continues to be utterly uninterested in sexuality.
On a final note, Luna revealed something about Dr. Xeno. She repeated his motto: “Science is elegant.” That made Senku realize he knew Dr. Xeno. A former NASA scientist, Dr. X corresponded with Senku when he was still a small child. Basically, Dr. Xeno was Senku’s adult pen-pal/mentor who got him interested in rocket science. He always ended his letters with the phrase, “Science is elegant.” To be continued.
~Thanks for reading~
Written by 7Mononoke at Anime Rants
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